> At the moment, we have one scheduled presentation on Flow Label issues,
> by Winston Seah (draft-shen-ipv6-flow-trans-00.txt), and we would like
> to offer the opportunity for others who were arguing for alternative
> semantics for the Flow Label field to summarize their proposals. If
> I recall correctly, the debate came to down to basically three
> different choices for Flow Label semantics:
>
> (1) a non-mutable value that, when concatenated with the source
> address, can be used by routers to identify flows. (This was
> the original design, described in pre-RFC2460 versions of
> the IPv6 spec.)
>
> (2) a mutable value that can be or will be modified hop-by-hop,
> like an ATM virtual circuit identifier or an MPLS label.
>
> (3) a hybrid of (1) and (2) in which, say, one bit of the Flow
> Label field indicates whether or not the rest of the field
> is mutable.
I understand that the above 3 are the currently understood alternatives
for what the flow label semantics could be.
I think that I could construct arguments for either one of them
being the best; it all depends on what problem I think the 20 bits could be
used to solve. So while it might be useful to get arguments for and against the
various semantics on the table, there is a risk that this isn't productive is
folks have very different views of what problem they can solve using the flow
label field.
Thus before the WG can actually make any decisions about flow label
semantics I think we need to have folks write up the different
problem statements for which they see the flow label as a potential solution.
Then the WG can decide which problem(s) are the most important to solve
and whether or not using the flow label is the best solution. That would
then hopefully lead to nailing down the semantics of the flow label.
So having the discussion you propose is fine, but please keep the problem
statements in mind.
Erik
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